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Biennial of Thought

The Biennial of Thought was launched in 2018 with a view to debating the role of cities in the great challenges facing contemporary society. It emerged with the aim of becoming a celebration of the city as a forum in which to discuss the cities that we want and that we need, with plural views and the participation of everyone.

Dancing with Memory

An audiovisual performance

The artist and activist Nzé Ramón Esono Ebalé presents an artistic intervention in which he engages with personal memories and that of his birthplace, Equatorial Guinea, in order to construct his critical reflections on the colonial past and its legacy today.

Kenneth Roth

The Battle for Human Rights

There is an alarming contrast between the theoretical global consensus on the importance of human rights and the unevenness of respect for these fundamental principles. Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Humans Rights Watch, speaks with the journalist Anna Bosch about the challenges ...

Anne Waldman

"Star at Midnight", poetry recital

The poet, a living legend of American poetry and an international reference in oral poetry, performs with local artists in a single session that sets out to claim poetry as a tool for conveying ideas and for new ways of acting.

Regarding the Pain of Others

A reading set to music

A staged and musicalized interpretation of fragments of Susan Sontag's "Regarding the pain of others", with Carlota Subirós, Clara Aguilar, and Yolanda Sey

Masha Gessen and Carolin Emcke

New Fascisms

The journalist Masha Gessen and the philosopher Carolin Emcke will speak about the need to construct new imaginaries for the future in a present context marked by the war in Ukraine and the spread of hate speech and various forms of authoritarianism.

Óscar Martínez, Jairo Videa and Juan Daniel Treminio

A Country without Journalists

The three investigative journalists from Central America speak about the difficulties of doing their job in situations of violence where making truths known almost always means putting one’s own life at risk.

Antonio Damasio and Anil Seth

The Mysteries of Consciousness

The doctor and researcher Antonio Damasio speaks with the neuroscientist and educator Anil Seth about the latest discoveries in the field of neuroscience, which are shedding light on the mysteries of consciousness and opening up new viewpoints from which to think what makes us humans.

A morning with Carolin Emcke

A right has never been won forever

Philosopher and journalist Carolin Emcke, accompanied by trans sociologist and activist Miquel Missé, reflects with the students on the collective effort to maintain an open and plural society, at a critical time when rights and freedoms that we believed were guaranteed stagger.

Bivac. Encounter under the Elements

We are young and we feel that we are living under the elements, vulnerable navigators in an ocean of uncertainties. Five pairs of artists and thinkers, coming from diverse contexts and positions, reflect in short conversations on the present and its possible futures.

Jane Mansbridge

The Art of Listening

Jane Mansbridge, a leading voice in contemporary political thought, will talk with political scientists Josep Lluís Martí and Felipe Rey Salamanca about the current challenges for Democracy and the role of listening as an instrument to guarantee their future.

Bivac. Correspondences

Dramatic reading of an epistolary exchange between a writer and a filmmaker, accompanied by music, a dance piece and visuals.

Andrey Kurkov and Simona Škrabec

Another Ukraine

Andrey Kurkov, writer and president of PEN Ukraine, speaks with the writer and translator Simona Škrabec about the situation in his country after the Russian invasion and all the unknowns with regard to the possibility of putting an end to the conflict.

Lucrecia Martel i Carla Simón

Stop to Observe, Love the World

Filmmakers and screenwriters Lucrecia Martel and Carla Simón talk with film critic Violeta Kovacsics about how cinema creates new ways of seeing and new spaces of encounter.

A morning with Marina Garcés

The time of promises

In this exercise in collective imagination the philosopher Marina Garcés invites young people in our city to delete the questions of fear and make the future a time for promises. 

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Yuval Noah Harari and Rutger Bregman

Shared Futures

 In the current context, when we are far from having put an end to violence and inequalities on the planet, thinking about the future has surely become the challenge that requires maximum audacity. The historians Yuval Noah Harari and Rutger Bregman speak about the challenges of the present ...

Svetlana Alexievich

The Voices of Europe

Svetlana Alexievich speaks about the future we can imagine for Europe from a perspective forged in the east of the continent and permeated by the polyphonic chorus of witnesses who have populated her long career as a journalist and writer.

A hint of light

The end of the Biennale programme coincides with the conclusion of Barcelona Poesia 2020. Hence, this year, we express this coincidence with a recital that invites reflection and, poetically speaking, thinks of the future through the voices of young authors from around the world, because we ...

City, Conflict and Emancipation

“Freedom or death!”, one of the most shouted slogans in the history of the West, proclaimed that life was only worth living if something greater than life itself was recognised. The pandemic has jettisoned the ideas we had inherited about freedom and death, survival, a full life, ...

City, Conflict and Emancipation

Cities are spaces of a multiplicity of lives, stories, and worlds. The writers Marta Sanz and Cristina Morales have described in their works this structural violence incarnated by cities and have pondered the possibilities of emancipation beyond the limits imposed by the norm. The writer and ...

Zoomer Culture

In the last decade, the expansion of Internet-based technologies has led to the emergence of new languages which, thanks to their interconnectivity and the reach of social networks, have overturned the cultural paradigm. What cultural phenomena interest the new generations and how have they been affected by the pandemic and the lockdown? The youtuber and philosopher Ernesto Castro moderates this discussion with the journalist and writer Anna Pacheco, who will analyse popular culture from the perspective of gender and class; the philosopher and transactivist Elizabeth Duval, who has written about the power of the media on the basis of her experience as a public figure; and the journalist Claudia Rius, who has focused on emerging cultural manifestations within the Catalan cultural ecosystem. ...

5 Futures

Five people from very different backgrounds and of a wide range of profiles present the futures they imagine. Five voices, five stories. The essayist Peter Frase talks about capitalism and technology, while the philosopher Laura Llevadot focuses on the domain of political thought. The environmentalist ...

Maria Arnal, María Sánchez and Irene Solà

The Voices of the Planet

We might say that understanding the world consists in living immersed in stories. Singer Maria Arnal puts music to the words of the philosopher Donna Haraway, and is joined by the writers María Sánchez and Irene Solà, the three weaving a tale of fish and nature, of drought ...

Enric Casasses

Poetic Manifesto for the Future

Accompanied by the music of Ilia Mayer, poet Enric Casasses, winner of the Premi d’Honor de les Lletres Catalanes, reflects on the concept of freedom, putting to it words paradoxically found during lockdown.

Donna Haraway and Vinciane Despret

Phonocene

Biologist and philosopher Donna Haraway dialogues with the philosopher Vinciane Despret after the performative reading “Phonocene”. This dialogue, according to Haraway, is not about “us”, it’s about the world, about all the non-human voices that we had ceased to ...

Looking to the Future

The experience of the last few months, in a world ravaged by the pandemic, is an occasion for looking ahead in a different way and putting into words a future collective that retreats from dystopias and makes of this unlooked-for present a fount of new opportunities.  n this session, ...

Margaret Atwood

Looking at the future

Margaret Atwood talks to cultural journalist Anna Guitart. The writer, famous for works such as The Handmaid’s Tale, talks about the future of human beings on a planet under threat, while reviewing her biography and her literary career.

The Planet's Voices

Swamped in this anthropocentric gaze, we have lost our connections with our surroundings and have forgotten that neither our history nor our future can be written without the other inhabitants of Earth. In this session, the philosopher Vinciane Despret presents her reading-cum-performance ...